Tuned In Tech

Looking at SAMR with a Music Educator’s Lens

Music as a subject synchronizes especially well with technology, and using the SAMR model as a guide can be quite beneficial. As Ann Clements points out, “The arts have the natural creative potential to be less analog than most other subjects” (2016, p. 342). The transformative levels are easier to reach than ever with the seemingly endless array of technological tools. These resources make compositional and performance tasks that were once too complex into a possibility. The ability to create, arrange, edit, collaborate, and share musical products is all the more achievable at each age level of the elementary general music classroom with the use of digital tools.

As Evan Tobias, an associate professor of music education at Arizona State University points out, “Music education has a long history of integrating technology primarily in terms of tools and techniques that focus on particular ways of engaging in music such as developing aural skills, analyzing or creating music, and performing” (2016, p. 119). With the exponential increase of new apps, websites, and other forms of technological tools in extremely accessible formats for educators, SAMR provides a means for navigating the process of integrating technology in effective and evolved ways (Jacobs-Israel & Moorefield-Lang, 2013).

These tools allow for educators to mold and reshape their curriculum to a place where students are able to engage with music more aligned with the deeply interconnected and multifaceted roles people experience with music in society today. Taking this type of “hybrid” approach and incorporating these overlapping connections in the music classroom “emphasizes and promotes students’ artistic thinking and doing” (Tobias, 2016, p. 115).

Tasks and Tools for the SAMR Music Room

The following is a collection of technological tools with music tasks organized by SAMR level. One thing to keep in mind is that, such as the case with the Google Docs example presented earlier, it is possible for a tool to fall into more than one category depending on the student as well as the assigned task, processes, and features utilized. In these cases, multiple tasks are suggested. Additionally, as is to be expected with anything related to the constantly-changing digital world of technology and its resources, it is very possible that some of these tools may no longer be accessible or another tool might be created that is more useful and comprehensive. These suggestions are meant to serve as a starting point for discovery and a means to come to understand the SAMR model and the possibilities it provides in the music room.

Again, the SAMR model is not meant to be tool-focused, rather centered on learning task and process. As Puentedura reminds, “Don’t start from the technology… start with an aspect that you wish were stronger. What is it that you wish students understood better?” (McQuade, 2015). The technological tool is meant to be one supporting resource in an educator’s extensive pedagogical toolbox.

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Resource List

Tech tools and SAMR music tasks

Lesson Plans

Lessons for the music room using SAMR

References